I found an old working sega nomad with a busted screen. Meanwhile, I'm having trouble fitting my sega genesis Model 1 in with my many other consoles, as it is not stackable unlike the NES, Wii, and front-slot atari bibin has set up in the living room. This poor nomad was just screaming to me "Tear me apart! Make me into a slim sega genesis! You already have a working nomad! Bring me life! LIFE!"
Of course, first I'd have to take it apart.
Let's get onto that:
The first four screws were easy to get off. However, the last one, located on the bottom-centre... It was one of those blasted NINTENDO SCREWS! I thought "SCREW this!" (CLEVER EH? EH?) and just ripped that sucker apart. I broke a screw post. Boo hoo; I frankly don't care.
Now that this thing is apart, I'm stuck. It has a small board on the rear-nomad-piece containing the cart slot, the second controller port, and clearly the genesis itself. It is labled with "PC BD VENUS MAIN" Which clearly indicates that this is the mainboard of the nomad, codename "venus".
On the second side, the one containing the screen, A/V output, DC in, power switch, buttons, and speaker, there was a much larger board. This is the daughterboard, despite being larger. The two are connected by a 30 pin ribbon cable, large enough to be easily soldered to and extended if need be.
Now, since that smaller board is clearly the bulk of the genesis if not all of it, it should function on it's own. It also contains its' own non-charging battery terminals, which are just my way of saying "secondary DC-in". I've wired 9 volts to them before on my *other* nomad and it works fine.
I would assume that this 30-pin connector contains the extra DC in, the RGB signal, the audio, and the controller buttons.
Let's see here:
RGB: 4 pins (R, G, B, sync) or 3 pins (R, G+sync, B)
Composite: 1
Some power: 1
Controller: 12, assuming each button gets it's own, counting mode
Audio: 2 (L and R)
Power Switch: 1
Ground: 1
Probably an extra ground for good measure: 1
Hmm, that's just twenty three. Regardless, this ribbon will certainly contain an RGB signal, and the controller. Those are the things I need from it.
Why an RGB signal? Well, the sega nomad LCD was an analog RGB screen. The little AV plug on the top of the nomad outputs RGB and composite, a benheck hacker's saviour. The composite is generated on the daughterboard, I think.
As I need this to output composite, I'll likely have RGB and composite pins on the back, as I'll want to some day have it use RGB for when we get a fancy TV.
If I need to, I will keep that nasty large daughterboard and remove the LCD, inverter, backlight, and speaker, leaving only what's necessary. Then I'll need to wire up a controller port for player 1, as the nomad previously relied on using built in buttons.
I aim for this to be about the size of a closed laptop, about 1" thick.
So yeah, I need help from here. Do I need to use that daughterboard, or is there a way I can just use the mainboard?
Sega nomad hack
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